The Governor of California facilitates passage of a law mandating so-called cap and trade for industries in the state. The law requires companies exceeding pollution limits to pay fees for credits so they can pollute within the law; funds from their fees are to address environmental issues. But that same governor decrees – in defiance of the law – that a quarter billion cap and trade dollars be diverted to fund his unpopular and court-stalled bullet train project. That same governor – and his predecessor – decided a few years back to disagree with the voter-adopted amendment to the California Constitution defining marriage as between a man and a woman. They refused their obligation to defend the laws and constitution of the state and actually attacked them in court, effectively preventing even private parties from standing for those laws.

The President of the United States decides to disagree with federal law defining marriage. He later chooses to disagree with immigration law; he most famously disagrees with his own healthcare law – after seeing the fruit. In the first two, he and his like-minded attorney general simply refused to enforce and even attacked these laws in court; in the last, he has unilaterally re-written the law twenty-seven times. None of these actions – state or federal – is within the authority or the oaths of these officials. Now, Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring announces he will not tolerate the marriage provisions of his state’s constitution. Is integrity in political office a reasonable expectation?

Let me ask another way. If we cannot reasonably expect integrity from our leaders, why ask them to swear an oath to exercise their duties faithfully and in accountability to the laws and constitutions supplying their authority? But – we hear – these men and women have a conscience of their own, and surely they are entitled to act within their convictions. Really?

They are so entitled; they are even morally obligated to so act. But when they cannot in good conscience keep the oath they swore and the accountability they assumed, the honorable thing is to resign their office and press for change as the advocates they long to be. To simply usurp power they were never granted is neither conscientious nor honest. It is arrogance masquerading as integrity, and those who practice it should be removed from office and treated with disdain.

Officeholders and other governmental types do not corner the market on phony integrity. Those who seek to advance the gay agenda by presenting themselves as prophets of civil rights are classic examples of scam artists seeking to mold conviction. They have the brass to claim Dr. Martin Luther King would be marching beside them if he were alive today. The circular reasoning is: Dr. King was the greatest civil rights leader – true enough – and gay rights are a civil right; therefore, King would support gay rights. Michael Long’s 2012 book about King and gay rights is a recent addition to the mountain of unsupported inferences. The problem is the facts get in the way.

Dr. King’s daughter Bernice says of her father, “He did not take a bullet for same sex unions” at his graveside calling for a constitutional amendment defining marriage in Biblical terms. He was a Bible-believing Christian all his life who rarely spoke about homosexuality; when he did, he was Biblically consistent. Through his advice column for Ebony Magazine in the late fifties, he wrote these words to a struggling young man: “The type of feeling that you have toward boys is probably not an innate tendency, but something that has been culturally acquired. You are already on the right road to a solution, since you honestly recognize the problem and have a desire to solve it.” King’s love for all persons comes across; just as clear is his conviction God did not make people gay and that there are solutions to every problem if we seek God and His healing. Reality is that King’s words, written more than half a century ago, are in sync with the most reliable scientific evidence regarding causation of homosexuality.

People who differ with me on this issue are doubtless grinding their teeth in rage. Well and good. Make your case. But don’t stoop to putting words in another man’s mouth. Alongside all the loving things Jesus said were confrontive words like, “Thou shalt not bear false witness,” and of the Pharisees, “You shut the Kingdom of Heaven in men’s faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to.” He came to bring abundant life, but the gift requires honesty and integrity in order to be received.